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If you're charging it with your own muscles, sure. Or you could just put rocks in your panniers.

It makes sense to me...

For example if the the e-bike rider had to spend 1/5 of the energy of the unpowered cyclist (numbers chosen for the example's sake) that would be 1.1Wh/km they exert.

The remaining 12.9Wh/km would be what was discharged from the battery while riding (from using pedal assist and/or throttle features). This can be measured when you charge it back up at the end of the trip to the previous level.

Have you heard of this miraculous thing called public transit? And there are things called panniers which are pretty cool too.

But frankly, if you don't have groceries within walking distance, your neighborhood and your zoning laws are very poorly designed.

And that's deliberate. Neighborhoods around the world are designed to require cars to live in, because of oil company lobbying, and also for "security", in order to keep out people too poor to own cars.

Getting rid of cars requires changing the various ways our cities are designed to make cars necessary. That's worth doing too.

That means the urban planning in your area is garbage. That is fixable and has to be fixed.

It's already normalized to distance, the graph is showing kWh/km. The speed is just there for additional context.

Trip distance is dependent on methods of transportation at the aggregate level. That's only relevant for policy decisions or collective actions, not individuals of course, but if we are going to deal with climate change, collective action is necessary.

Given the graph is normalized by km traveled, its overly generous to cars.

yes, I thought it was backwards and was quite surprised

I guess it's hard to gauge an e-bike since they often have a variety of operating modes ranging from progressively higher levels of pedal assist up to full throttle. But that's fascinating to think that an all-electric ride may actual consume less energy in the grand scheme of things. I had never looked at it that way!

I think many people peddle just as hard on an electric bike, so the 5.5 kWh/km is a given, the rest is the energy required to go faster. Since air resistance increases with the square of the speed, it might very well be the case that 14 kWh/km at 25 km/h is more efficient than what the human alone would need to deliver for the same speed.

Edit: I failed to take into account that for the human at the same level of effort the power remains constant, not the energy per kilometer. Going faster at the same power output would reduce the energy expenditure per kilometer for the human to about 4 kWh/km, which would indicate that 10 kWh/km is being delivered by the motor to go faster.

That being said, it might be the case that they just calculated the energy needed to move the bicycle without taking the energy efficiency of the digestive system into account.

A quick googling tells me a burger is about 3kg of CO2 equivalents. 1L of gas seems to be about 2,5kg.

Now if you were to eat local and seasonal food I'd guess you can get more efficient than burning oil.

Edit: As @bjorney correctly pointed out a quick google in the morning, before the brain functions properly kick in, isn't the best way to produce comments on numbers. I did NOT account for the factor of about 15 that a burger needs to get close the energy stored in a liter of gasoline.

Edit to the edit: Just out of curiosity I did another quick google (please brain, be functioning now) and it seems that to get 8500kcal from oats you need about 2,5kg. This seems to produce about 1kg of co2 equivalents. I am certain that this does not include the amount of co2 the human is expelling in excess by using their muscles instead of a motor, so the whole discussion is probably moot anyways.

The biggie is urban planning to ensure that people don't need to travel huge distances on a routine basis. That means that people give up very little.

Time efficiency in a modern urban area optimized for public transport and non-motorized transport modes compared to time efficiency in current typical urban areas, which are focused on individual motorized transport modes with severe lack of public transport:

[Fancy chart: first case left, second case right]

[Good] [Bad]

Time us is so heavily dependent on location you cant standardize the data effectively

you're welcome. It's something I try to do routinely.

I believe most e-bikes in Europe are limited to 25km/h. 32km/h in Canada.

Mine goes up to 35 km/h when is freshly charged, down 75% of battery to 30 km/h.

We should probably just stop eating.